The return of the stricken Gothic
It is 50 years since the ship that once carried a newly crowned Elizabeth II around Australia and New Zealand left Bluff on a trip of tragedy and heroism. Michael Fallow reports.
When the Gothic sailed from Bluff with a bellyful of frozen meat and wool, Joe Collett watched with more admiration than a cargo ship would usually evoke.
‘‘A beautiful, graceful vessel with lights ablaze. She was there in all her glory like a real Queen,’’ he would later say.
Real indeed. This Shaw Savill craft had once been not just a luxury 85-passenger liner, but a designated Royal Yacht, taking Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales on her 1953 post-coronation Australasian tour before the Britannia took over the role.
Those glory days were behind it and the Gothic was by this stage earning an honest living shipping cargo. But remnants of luxury remained inside, particularly all that handsome wood panelling.
Handsome, but flammable. Eight days later, on August 1 1968, 1800 miles east of Bluff, more than just the Gothic’s lights were ablaze.
In the face of a Force 8 gale and high seas, a fire erupted below deck and spread with ferocity, claiming seven lives.
Four of them were a single holiday-bound family, the Hallidays, travelling to Britain on 10c fares. A generosity from the company for whom the father worked.
Nobody except the crew of 72 and the handful of passengers – a couple of wives were also aboard – knew of tragedy out there in the middle of nowhere.
Not until August 4 when the faintest of messages came through to Southland’s Awarua Radio, where Collett was an operator.
It was indistinct, garbled, but Awarua got the key points. An XXX signal. Not as serious as
SOS but urgent. And it gave co-ordinates.
‘‘But by then we were nearly back,’’ says refrigeration engineer Alan McMahon, speaking from his Liverpool home half a century later.
For days they’d been sending weak-range messages from a crank-up lifeboat radio.
‘‘Someone had to wind the handle while the sparky sent the messages.’’
Will he talk about the fire? Yes. But not to casually regale anybody with details.
‘‘It was horrific, to be honest.’’ He’d been on the midnight to 4am watch, below deck, when he noticed the smell. Then smoke started coming through the fans.
He and a greaser hastened above, where flames were leaping around the forward deck.
‘‘Inside, it was so hot, but outside the weather was so cold,’’ recalls McMahon.
‘‘It was a real storm. The waves and rain were driving against the front of the bridge. The big picture windows across the front just shattered with the difference in temperature – then the wind went straight through.
‘‘Those old firstclass passenger boats were lovely inside but everything was panelled wood. Once it started to burn it burns quite fast. ‘‘We were heading into the weather head on, which was blowing the flames through the length of the ship.’’
But though the bridge was lost, the ship’s steering and engine telegraph disabled, Captain Brian Agnew, using engine commands, relayed by another crew member to the engine room, turned the Gothic from the mouth of the storm.
It was crucial to the efforts of the crewmen battling the flames with 12 hoses.
For McMahon, up top, the extremity of the moment focused his mind, keeping deeper fears at bay. One of his crewmates later told reporters: ‘‘I was too scared to be frightened.’’
Another: ‘‘It was like a blast furnace . . . red hot . . . the bulwarks (the extension of the ship’s sides above the deck) were just leaning in.’’
A third voice – a Geordie – ‘‘When I saw those bulkheads buckling I nearly jumped out of my skin.’’
Among the dead crew, third electrician Edward Skelley had been helping two mates on a hose. The others were beaten back by the heat but he was last seen ‘‘standing rigidly before the flame’’.
He was lost overboard. Bad as it was on deck, it was worse below.
The fire had started in what was called – oh dear – the officers’ smoke room. Little used at sea, it was directly below the cabins where Plimmerton-based English migrant John Halliday and his two boys, Alan, 11 and David, 7, had been sleeping.
Mother Eileen was in a separate cabin and safe, for starters. They ordered her to the back of the ship but that’s not where her family was.
Amid the turmoil she died heading towards them, fighting her way through fire and smokefilled corridors.
Later, when the Gothic finally made it back to Wellington, fire authorities examined the damage and determined that if the fire had happened in port, the ship would have been lost.
McMahon allows himself the smallest of chuckles at the reminder. At sea you have a tad more by way of incentive.
‘‘Out there in the absolute middle of nowhere, with the weather like that, there was no way you’d have got away on a lifeboat or anything like that. Your best bet was to stay on the ship and that was it, really.’’
In fact lifeboats were readied on the embarkation deck and the surviving wives taken to them. ‘‘Some of us got into those boats (too),’’ a crewman told reporters in Wellington. ‘‘Then we had a look at those waves. They weren’t waves. They were like the side of the house. We got out of the boats as fast as we could.’’
It took about six hours to quell the fire. Mercifully, they’d kept it out of the engine room.
Ahead lay the sombre task of sea burials. The Halliday family hadn’t been anonymous passengers.
McMahon: ‘‘You get to know people. It’s a small community on a ship.’’
The return journey was beset with challenges.
The ship had to be steered from emergency gear back by the stern, after rigging up a temporary telephone to a lookout on the ravaged bridge.
McMahon: ‘‘Absolutely nothing was left on the bridge. All the charts and all the gear had been destroyed.’’
Press reports refer to ‘‘an emergency compass with unknown error’’ and highlight the sketchiness of the map. which did give an indication of currents and magnetic variation but was far less detailed than the standard charts.
Meanwhile, radio officer Roger Cliffe, who had grabbed emergency portable radio gear from the smokefilled radio room, had spent five days on the open deck continuously transmitting weak messages into the void.
The lack of radio communication had roused no particular concerns on land.
‘‘After that, the company made it a rule that every ship had to report in every day,’’ McMahon says. ‘‘Until then, you’d tell them when you were leaving New Zealand, or arriving at Panama, and leave it at that.’’
For him, the return journey wasn’t a contemplative time any more than the fire had been. His meat cargo was intact but everyone was plenty busy. You worked, you slept and you ate.
‘‘Fortunately, where the crew used to live down aft, they had their own galley originally. There were two big pots, one of porridge, one of stew, and they were your meals.’’
When Awarua Radio spread the alarm the ship’s return journey, the latter stages of the return were big news in New Zealand and the UK. The Royal Yacht was now making headlines as the Death Ship.
The heroics of the captain and crew, and the names of the dead – the family, Skelley, Daniel Mulcahy of Hartlepool and Paul Goldfinch of Kent – were broadcast worldwide.
Back in Britain, McMahon’s parents Elsie and John, received a letter from Shaw Savill notifying them of the fire, and that the families of the dead had been contacted already.
Communication from the Gothic was limited and to-the-point, and overhead flights provided vivid details of a vessel trailing a miles-long oilslick, battling its way back through heavy seas, its rusty brown charring visible testament to it difficulties.
Actually it was making pretty good time. Nothing wrong with those engines.
The NZ frigate Blackpool was sent to rendezvous with it at the entrance to Wellington harbour.
The Gothic was welcomed back by a crowd calling encouragements to recognised crew members – ‘‘We didn’t let you down, Bill!’’ – and while the captain praised his crew – ‘‘ they played their parts without any panic and with determination’’ – the crew in turn praised the captain for his . . . well . . . ‘‘The Old Man was grand’’ .
The Queen apparently thought so too, as Agnew’s subsequent OBE testified. She and the Duke of Edinburgh had sent a message of sympathy to the captain, crew and relatives of the dead. It added: ‘‘The Queen remembers so well the very happy months which she spent on the Gothic’’.
McMahon speaks warmly of the support provided by the people of Wellington. The ship was patched up and finally made it back to Liverpool.
With, the refrigeration engineer reminds us cheerfully, its Bluff meat still in perfect condition.